“One morning a man jumped down from the stage whose face she knew. He had recognized my father's outfit and he came to speak to her, amazed to find her in that place alone. There was no need to put her worst fear into words; he knew the keeper. He made the best he could of father's detention, but he assured her, as she knew too well, that she could not wait for him there. He was on his way East, and he took us with him as far as Mountain Home. To this day she believes that if Bud Granger had led the search, my father would have been found; but he went East to sell his cattle, the snows set in, and the search party came straggling home. The man, Granger, had left a letter of explanation, inclosing one from mother to father, with the keeper. He bribed and frightened him, but for years she used to agonize over a fear that father had come back and the keeper had withheld the letter and belied her to him with some devilish story that maddened him and drove him from her. Such a fancy might have come out of her mental state at that time. I believe that Granger left the letter simply to satisfy her. He must have believed my father was dead. He could not have conceived of a man's being lost in that broad country at that season; but my father was a man of hills and farms, all small, compact. The plains were another planet to him. “The letter was found in the keeper's clothing after his death; no one ever came to claim it of his successor. Somewhere in this great wilderness a tired man found rest. What would we not give if we knew where! “And she worked in a hotel in Mountain Home. Can you imagine it! Then Christine was born and the multiplied strain overcame her. Strangers took care of her children while she lay between life and death. She had been silent about herself and her past, but they found a letter from one of her old schoolmates asking about teachers' salaries in the West, and they wrote to her begging her to make known my mother's condition to her relatives if any were living. At length came a letter from grandfather--characteristic to the last. The old home was there, for her and for her children, but no home for the traitor, as he called father. She must give him up even to his name. No Bogardus could inherit of a Van Elten.